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So I was going through some old papers today and I found something remarkably awful: Angsty teenage poetry! I’m guessing I must have written it when I was about seventeen, give or take. And because I didn’t get any blog post written today (and I’m feeling a bit cruel) I’m going to share it with you. Flee while you still can!

“Confusion (The Self)”

What is this place?
Who are these people?
I know all their faces
know the sound of each voice
I know all their memories
every thought, every choice
I remember the touch
of their skin and their hair
it’s all so familiar
but when was I there?
I savor the flavor
of their blood, sweat and tears
I’m tasting their souls
all their hopes, all their fears
I love them all dearly
this alien flight
can’t wait to kill them as
we make love tonight
is this my mind, my soul,
or some rampant dimension of the self?
is this me?
what am I?

Yes folks, that’s the real deal there. I don’t remember writing that and I have no idea what was going on at the time. But I’m sure whatever it was I was dramatic about it.

Anyway, that’s all for tonight. Hopefully I’ll have something new for you tomorrow.

Ever see Mallrats? The second of Kevin Smith’s New Jersey series, and usually considered the weakest, it had a character who was a teenager writing a book about sex, which she researched by having lots of sex with different men that she carefully recorded.

I’d completely forgotten about the movie and the character until out of the blue this morning when I suddenly thought: “Her results are going to be skewed because all her subjects were guys who were willing to have sex with a 15 year old girl.”

Considering the already pessimistic tone she had for the content of her work, that can’t have changed things in a happy direction.

The post I’ve been working on is taking longer than expected, and I’m getting sick of working on it tonight. But I thought of something neat: MMS can send to email, and WordPress allows posting by email, so it should be possible for me to post from my phone!
Which is what I’m trying now, if you can read this, I’ve successfully posted to my blog from my phone, and that’s awesome.

You know, if any organization could properly be called “evil”, it must be the Catholic Church. It’s rare that a month goes by without some new atrocity coming to light, usually something related to covering up, enabling, or blaming the victims of child rape, but occasionally it’s something different, like telling Africans that condoms spread AIDS, or excommunicating a doctor for saving a little girl’s life, or ordering hospitals to let women die rather than terminate a lethal pregnancy.

Can’t believe I forgot this in my last post! On the bright side it lets me get two posts out of one subject, so that’s handy. (On the down side, it’s kinda dull)

In that video, the American Life League shows some numbers for abortions provided (329,445) and birth control pills dispensed (315,399,600). No sources are given for these numbers, nor is there a time frame provided, though I was able to find the abortion figure from Planned Parenthood’s report for 2010.

Trying to figure out the birth control figure was interesting. As you know, unless you’re a right-wing media personality, most birth control requires a woman to take a pill every day, regardless of whether she’s having sex or not. So on average a woman requires 365 pills every year. Simple enough.

Depending on what you use for the length of the year, whether you count leap years etc, 315,399,600 gives us 863,517.04 to 864,108.49 women who could be provided birth control over a one year period with that number of pills. For simplicity’s sake, let’s round that off to 864,000 women over one year. This is all still assumption, of course, because neither sources nor time frames were provided. But I wanted to run with it a bit because the perspective is interesting.

According to the US Census, in 2010 there were 308,745,538 Americans, of which 50.8% were women. That gives us 156,842,733.304 women in America. Since we’re already rounding off to the nearest thousand, let’s call that 156,843,000. That means that huge number of birth control pills, 315,399,600, is enough to provide 0.55% of American women with birth control for one year. A little over half of one percent, just five or six out of a thousand women.

Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood’s own information tells us that they provide various forms of contraception to 2.2 million people every year, about 39.5% of which are oral contraceptives. I fiddled with that a bit and came close to AL’s figure, but not quite there. Curious. You’d think all contraception would be equally evil, but for some reason the pill is worse.

It’s almost as if female sexuality is considered weird and bad, while male sexuality is normal. Thwarting God’s Will by taking a pill to get an erection is fine, but doing it by taking a pill to prevent ovulation is bad.

This is boring and getting depressing, so I’m going to wrap it up. Planned Parenthood is one of the few organizations out there that seem to genuinely make the world a better place with everything they do, or at least everything they aim to do. Their website is wonderful, filled with useful information that everyone should have access to, and I strongly recommend that you visit it. Maybe make a donation while you’re there.

I’m running into Poe’s Law here. I genuinely have no idea whether or not this is a parody. If it were just the videos I’d assume it was, but after looking over the website a little I find it hard to believe that anyone could work this hard on a parody. Here’s the video:

It’s just amazing, isn’t it? I saw this Monday on a post by Christina at WWJTD, who probably wrote more coherently about it than I will. Frankly I’m tempted to just point and laugh.

If you don’t feel like spending six and a half minutes of your precious life watching this shit, and I can’t say I blame you, it directly compares Planned Parenthood to drug dealers. Seriously. Saying that PP gets kids addicted to sex so that they can sell abortions. I am not making this up, it’s right there in the video. You see why I’m not sure whether they’re joking or not? Read the rest of this entry →

I was kidnapped on Monday, and my day trip turned out a bit longer than expected. So now I’m playing catch-up, which probably means short posts, in theory, but I saw a video Monday that was so crazy I might have to do a detailed break down of it.

Like this:

17 year old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed on February 26 by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman. Zimmerman is claiming self-defense, and apparently the police believe him, because he hasn’t been arrested or charged.

That’s about all I know for sure about this. But if you click here you can listen to some of the 911 calls made on that night, and they’re certainly suggestive.

At the time Zimmerman spoke to police, he was in a car and had a loaded gun. He had all the power in this situation. It seems likely that if he’s stayed in the car and stopped following the kid, as he was told to do, this would have been just another case of cops questioning a boy for walking while black. In one of those 911 calls you can hear, in the background, screams for help which go silent after a gunshot.

I’m not going to say that Zimmerman is a murderer. It’s difficult for me to believe that it was self-defense, but I wasn’t there, I don’t know. In a society that has, or at least purports to have, the rule of law it’s not my place to make that judgment, that’s for actual judges and juries to do. Not me, and not the Sanford Police. Justice is clearly not being done, here.

Here’s a link to a Change.org petition to push for prosecution, if you feel like signing.

By now you may have heard about this week’s Doonesbury storyline, the one that many newspapers aren’t publishing. Here’s a link to the beginning of it, you can click on the strip itself to see a larger image. Just click through and read it.

All done? Good, now read this actual account of an actual woman going through that actual nightmare. Especially if you’re Texan, Republican, or male, don’t make excuses, fucking read it. Imagine it, try to visualize going through that. Imagine someone you love having to do that. Read the rest of this entry →

A sixteen year old girl in Morocco has killed herself. During the last days of her life she was beaten and starved after being forcibly married to the man who raped her, a marriage she was forced into by a judge acting in accordance with the law of the land. This is the 21st century, and a judge forced a teenage girl to marry her attacker, and did it lawfully.

Nothing about this makes sense to me. I can’t understand how her parents could be talked into this, I can’t understand why a judge would order it, I can’t understand why a court would recommend it, I can’t understand why it’s an actual part of any law that a man could avoid prosecution for rape by marrying his victim, I can’t understand how anybody could ever think it’s a good idea in the first place. I can only assume the law was written by serial rapists who knew they’d eventually get caught, it’s the only way I can imagine that happening. Read the rest of this entry →

Great to see you everybody! Did you all bring your knives? Julius should be here in a little while, he’s going to be so surprised! While we wait, here are the search engine queries that led people to my blog over the last 30 days. As usual, search terms are bold while my commentary is italic. Read the rest of this entry →

A friend sent me a link to the AXIS Dance Company. This innovative dance troupe “paved the way for a powerful contemporary dance form called physically integrated dance.” What this means in practice is that about half of the dancers are physically disabled.

It’s a really neat concept, and they do some very creative things. Until you’ve seen a woman spinning on the wheel of an occupied wheelchair lying on its side, you can’t really appreciate it. While many of the individual movements are fascinating to me, the actual performances don’t really interest me that much. I’m not sure if that’s a stylistic thing or if I’m just too much of a philistine to appreciate them. Read the rest of this entry →

It’s well known that things tend to happen in cycles. Apparently men’s tights are coming back into style now. To be honest, I’m a little angry about that.

Oh, I don’t mind the changing trends of fashion or that something could go from men to women and now both, or that these arrive just as I’m starting to really enjoy loose clothing. No, what really pisses me off is that they’re calling them “mantyhose”. Fucking mantyhose, people!

But, disgust over nomenclature aside, it raises some interesting questions about style. Male fashions separated from hosiery a long time ago, (I think during the 17th century, but I may be mistaken) and most menswear today is just so very different from then. I think it will take a while for the evolution of fashion to reach a point where you’ll see guys wearing them on casual Friday.

Personally, I’d love to see this combined with this. Don’t know what else to wear with that, but black leather and shiny steel comes to mind. Any suggestions?